L.D. 15, Isaiah 53:1-12 "Because It Matters" Scott Hoezee

For some time now I've thought that it would be quite interesting to do a study to determine how Georg Friedrich Handel's oratorio The Messiah has shaped the church's theological sensibilities. Probably such a study has been done already--it surely sounds like the stuff of a Ph.D. thesis! But if I had to guess, I would wager that we today are more familiar with certain Old Testament passages than most Christians had been prior to Handel's time. When the words of Scripture are set to the kind of powerful, indelible music such as you find in The Messiah, there is no avoiding those same words taking up residence in our hearts in a way that might not have happened without the music.

Isaiah 53 is a classic example. If you are even moderately familiar with Handel's oratorio, there is no way you can hear this chapter read without hearing also Handel's music in the background. When someone reads the "Surely" at the start of verse 4, you can just hear the chorus thundering that word. And it's really no wonder that Handel did as much with Isaiah 53 as he did. This passage, composed hundreds of years before Jesus' time, fits the gospel story so incredibly well, you could almost think it had been written based on what happened to Jesus instead of as a prediction of those events. For that same reason, as many of us know, director Mel Gibson also took a portion of Isaiah 53:5 and used it as the epigraph, or opening quote, for his recent film The Passion of the Christ.

But here's a curious thing that we don't always realize: the gospels themselves make virtually no reference whatsoever to this chapter! This past week I went through the four gospels and discovered only three passages that refer to Isaiah 53, and none of those three had anything to do with Jesus' suffering on the cross. Isn't that startling? This passage fits Jesus' suffering so well and yet the evangelists never mention it in that context. Instead we find one reference to Isaiah 53 in Matthew 8 in a story where Jesus is healing people of many diseases, prompting Matthew to say that this fulfilled Isaiah's words about taking up our infirmities. In John 12 Jesus is talking about the scandalous nature of the gospel and so makes a reference to Isaiah 53:1 about how difficult it is to believe God's message. The closest you get to Isaiah 53 tying in with Jesus' suffering at the end of his life comes in Luke 22 when Jesus makes a cryptic reference at the end of the Last Supper to being numbered among transgressors. Outside of those three verses, Isaiah 53 is not in the gospels.

Why? Why didn't the gospel writers do more with Isaiah 53? Did they think the parallel was too obvious even to mention? Whatever the explanation, this ties in with the larger theological debate about the purpose of Jesus' sufferings. No matter what you thought of Mel Gibson's movie, one of the good things it did was refresh the discussion about the nature of Jesus' passion. As most everyone knows, that movie spent the lion's share of its two hours depicting one piece of brutal torture after the next--the movie actually spent more time embellishing the scene of Jesus' flogging than it did on the actual crucifixion. In addition to setting off a debate about how true that all was to the Bible, it also underscored Mel Gibson's own belief that it was precisely the intensity of Jesus' physical torments that somehow saves the rest of us. It is by his stripes we are healed.

But there were those who disagreed. In an editorial published in The Christian Century, one writer claimed that Gibson had it all wrong: it is not Jesus' suffering that saves but his sacrificial death. This writer went so far as to claim that had Pontius Pilate pulled Jesus off the street and just quickly beheaded him, there would be no theological difference because it's the death, not the extent of the suffering and torture, that matters.

But on that point, the Heidelberg Catechism quite clearly disagrees. In Lord's Day 15 we are told that it was the lifelong suffering of Jesus that saves as much as his death. The Catechism further claims that the cross was not one option for Jesus' death among any number of other legitimate options. Instead we are told that the Godforsaken and accursed nature of specifically a cross make it clear that Jesus had to die that way and no other.

As on this spring morning we prepare to take to ourselves vivid reminders of our Lord's sacrifice, we need to pause long enough to ponder anew the why of it all. Why couldn't Jesus, as God's all-powerful Son, simply wave his hand and say, "All is forgiven! All is renewed"? Why wouldn't that have been enough? Why wasn't something like the Sermon on the Mount sufficient to set us all on a better, more God-glorifying course of life? Why does Isaiah 53 predict that this world's ugliness had to be laid on the Christ as the only way to make things right again? In short, how does Jesus' suffering connect to you and me?

In asking these questions, we enter a realm fraught with mystery. Why was God able to create the entire cosmos with no more than the power of his spoken word and yet the salvaging of that creation-run-amok took so much longer and involved so much more hard divine labor and, indeed, suffering? It's as though God can do anything with just the snap of his fingers except save us.

There is much here that is arresting. But if you are going to come to Jesus' sacred table this morning, then you need to do so with a lot of humility. Because the fact is we cannot get all our questions answered. Instead the Bible confesses that somehow, way down at the deep core of the universe, way down in murky regions that go well beyond our meager abilities to grasp, the Son of God's taking to himself the brokenness of life reversed the course of everything that ever contributed to this fractured reality in the first place.

Make no mistake: we enter here either a realm so profound as to constitute the most basic truth about everything or we here traffic in ideas that constitute the most ridiculous notion anyone ever came up with. As C.S. Lewis would point out, there is no middle ground. This business about the atonement is either absolutely correct, or it is absolutely false. Please don't look at Jesus, and above all at his cross, and say that it's maybe partly right, or that if it "works" for you, if it turns your spiritual crank, then that's fine and dandy for you but there are other equally legitimate ways of redeeming reality. No, we have to believe this was the only way. We have to believe that this way alone works, and it works precisely because ours is a world of undeniable suffering that needs to be met head on.

Last week I told you about mothers who boil water, telling their children they're making soup. But they have nothing to put into the water and so just let it simmer and simmer in the hope that the little ones will fall asleep before realizing that there is again nothing for supper. Who here can imagine the anguish of such a mother? But if there is anything to what we celebrate at the Lord's table in a few moments, it must include the idea that just such anguish is inside the soul of God's only Son. That very specific grief has been taken on by Jesus.

We suffer because this world derailed long ago. And there's something about the nature of our suffering that requires God not to stand back at a distance but he must enter it. So a car bomb explodes and, as the smoke clears, a father sees one piece of his child here, another over there. God must know this agony and he must suffer it so that he can heal it from the inside. When one you love shrinks down daily from disease, when the one who once played catch with the grandkids in the back yard can now no longer raise a spoon to his own lips, God must know how much that hurts you, how much that humiliates the sick person, so that he can enter it and reverse it from a position of knowing compassion.

God hates it all: the pain that tears at minds God fashioned in his own image, the cancers that eat away at the flesh God himself so lovingly created, the death that is the exact opposite of the flourishing of life God intended when he decided to share his life with a whole universe of creatures--God despises it all. Speaking for myself, when I see something I hate, when I catch wind of something that cuts against the grain of who I am, I usually look away, run away, change the channel. Sometimes we may learn about some awful disease that we'd never before heard about. When we do, we may say something like, "Well, I'll be sure to add that to my growing list of things I'd just as soon avoid!"

Indeed, who here visits the nursing floors at Raybrook, sees precious old souls drooped over in wheelchairs, their shirts stained with drool, and then thinks, "I sure hope that's how I end up, too." Who here goes to Metropolitan Hospital, witnesses a hip-fracture patient grimacing in pain as a therapist forces her to put weight on that broken piece of anatomy, and thinks, "Well, that may happen to me someday as well, but that's just fine."

We look at what we dislike, what we despise, what we fear, and we recoil, we go the other way, we pray that nothing like this will ever befall us. We may even call that a "natural" reaction. And perhaps it is. But maybe that is also why it took a supernatural reaction to save us. God did the unnatural, yet supernatural, thing of surveying the sum total of all that was fractured in this cosmos but then said, "All that must happen to me, too, and I am going to rush headlong into it in order, in the deep mysteries of my being, to triumph over it." God knew that were he to remain aloof from our sorrows, then his raw power would not be enough to deal with the brutal facts of our lives. We are not saved by power but weakness. That, my friends, is the heartbeat of the gospel.

And don't we now and again sense the dynamic here? You've heard this story before, but it bears repeating. The scene is the last day of school before the Christmas holiday. The boys and girls of an elementary school had just finished their Christmas program for the parents and now it was time to go home for the two-week vacation. One set of parents was waiting for Bobby, their Kindergartner who, along with all the other five- and six-year-olds, was carrying home a special project--the Christmas gift for Mom and Dad that the kids had been working on for weeks.

With great exuberance Bobby raced toward his folks trying to put on his coat and keep his backpack on his shoulder all the while. But Bobby tripped, and the special gift flew out of his hands, landing with a sickening ceramic crash. For a moment there was silence, and then Bobby wailed. His father quickly strode over and strongly said, "It's OK, Bob, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter." But his mother was wiser about such things and so she threw herself to the ground, embraced the tyke tightly and said, "Oh but it does matter, it matters a great deal indeed!" And she wept with her Bobby, she wept.

Who has understood our pain? Who knows to the depths our sorrows and the sufferings that sin has brought to every last person on this sad planet? God only knows that when it comes right down to it, you cannot erase this world's pain by waving it off and claiming it doesn't matter. It does matter. It matters a great deal indeed. And because our God in Christ knows that, he has mysteriously and profoundly made it possible one day to wipe away every tear from our eyes.

The bread and the wine of this holy table tell us that because Jesus let every ounce of joy get vacuumed out of his very soul, the day will come when he will say to each one of us, "My dear son, my dear daughter, enter now into the joy of my Father's kingdom." When that day comes, we won't even be tempted to ask, "How did you do this?" When you enter into joy, you will know that God in Christ did do it, and it will be enough. Eternally enough. Amen.